This is the North Branch Park River and a culvert in the vicinity of Mark Twain Drive and Granby Street. The stream (culvert) passes below the Weaver High grounds and Annie Fisher turf field.
Here is a pond along Mark Twain Drive.
Mistreating our water and mishandling our trash in Hartford is nothing new.
From the Hartford Courant in 1880: “We have had in this city a great deal of ignorant tinkering with sewers, waterworks, etc.”
From the Hartford Courant in 1893: “Nobody wants the stuff and everybody has it. We can’t give it away. We can’t dump it into the river.”
From the Hartford Courant in 1901: On Mather Street, a company was accused of illegally dumping “bundles of old wire, hoop skirts, old shoes, decayed clams, the inevitable tomato can and occasionally a dead cat.”
From the Hartford Courant in 1975: “The surface of the [South Branch Park River] was coated liberally with gasoline and oil. The shopping carts and discarded automobile tires posed threats to navigation.”
From the Hartford Courant in 1977: The Park River was among those rivers and harbors in Connecticut with the highest recorded levels of pesticides.
